Mar
15
2024

Is the SAT Racist?

Reader, you've come to the right place to find an answer to that question.

Well, more accurately, you've come to a website that will link you to John McWhorter's answer to that question: No, the SAT Isn’t Racist. Colleges, after making the SAT optional, are reversing course. It turns out that the SAT does a pretty good job of predicting academic success and (even better) can do a decent job of finding "diverse" applicants that might not otherwise be evident.

But McWhorter oh-so-diplomatically scorches the self-described "anti-racists":

Many might find it an awkward fit to label requiring the SAT for college admissions as antiracist. But we must attend carefully to what racism and antiracism actually are, as the words have come to occupy such broad swatches of semantic ground. In this light, the tacit sense of the SAT and similar tests as somehow anti-Black is dangerous.

This is because ideas have a way of undergoing mission creep. What an unspoken idea implies, a resonance in the air, eventually manifests itself as an openly asserted new position. In that vein, there is a short step between acknowledging that disadvantage makes it harder to ace the test — which is self-evidently true — and a proposition that is related but vastly more questionable: that Blackness is culturally incompatible with the test.

This is the ultimate source of the idea getting around in the education school world and beyond that it is “white” to cherish hard work, objectivity, the written word and punctuality. This conviction reveals itself both among white people (as in the creator of a graphic to this effect that the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture put online for a spell during the pandemic) and among Black people (such as a Black parent recalling a Black co-worker openly saying that standardized tests are unfairly imposed on Black kids because they “can’t do math,” with the implication of this as a general assumption).

We've put that graphic up before, and I'm pretty sure it's the most racist thing we've ever displayed:

[Aspects and Assumptions]

Also of note:

  • In Biden's brain, literacy loses. Veronique de Rugy takes a look at Biden's Corporate Tax Hike: Populism Versus Economic Literacy.

    In the latest volley of policy proposals that seem more rooted in populist rhetoric than economic knowledge, President Joe Biden's budget plan to hike the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% strikes me as particularly misguided. This move, ostensibly aimed at ensuring a "fair share" of contributions from corporate America, is a glaring testament to a simplistic and all-too-common type of economic thinking that already hamstrings our nation's competitiveness, stifles innovation, and ultimately penalizes the average American worker and consumer.

    Beyond the president's class warfare rhetoric, the lure of putting his hands on more revenue is one of the factors behind the proposal. Biden likes to pretend he is some sort of deficit cutter, but his administration is the mother of all big spenders. He's seeking $7.3 trillion for next year without acknowledging the insolvency of Social Security coming our way or addressing what happens when Congress makes the Republican tax cut permanent in 2025 for people earning less than $400,000 a year.

    Unfortunately, no fiscally irresponsible budget is complete without soothing individual taxpayers by promising to tax corporations. Never mind that the burden of corporate income tax hikes isn't shouldered by corporations. Yes, corporations do write the checks to the Internal Revenue Service, but the economic weight will be partially or fully shifted to others, such as workers through lower wages, consumers through higher prices, or shareholders through lower returns on investment. That means that many taxpayers making less than that $400k will be shouldering the cost of the corporate tax hike.

    It's great for demagoguery, though. Those taxpayers won't notice it on their 1040s.

  • It's a nice round number. Ars Technica reports that the FCC has officially made me behind the times: FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps.

    The Federal Communications Commission today voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds.

    An FCC press release after today's 3-2 vote said the 100Mbps/20Mbps benchmark "is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs," such as those used to distribute funding to expand networks. The new benchmark also reflects "consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by Internet service providers," the FCC said.

    The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There's been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised.

    My informal feeling about Pun Salad Manor's Internet connection is that it's "plenty fast enough."

    But there are easy-to-find "speed test" sites that will put a number on that. This morning, I'm consistently getting 75-80 Mbps down, 12 Mbps up. And the sites that bother to describe that result say it's "very fast".

    I predict Democrat-mandated higher speeds will result in higher costs. Which Democrats will then loudly denounce.